Nearly two years ago, NASA made history when its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly “tagged” 101955 Bennu to collect a regolith sample from the surface of the asteroid. While the mission won’t return to Earth until late next year, NASA shared new information about the celestial body. In an update published this week (via Mashable), the agency revealed OSIRIS-REx would have sunk into Bennu had the spacecraft not immediately fired its thrusters after touching the asteroid's surface.

"It turns out that the particles making up Bennu’s exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that if a person were to step onto Bennu they would feel very little resistance, as if stepping into a pit of plastic balls that are popular play areas for kids," NASA said.

That’s not what scientists thought they would find on Bennu. Observing the asteroid from Earth, the expectation was that its surface would be covered in smooth, sandy beach-like material. Bennu’s reaction to OSIRIS-REx’s touchdown also had scientists puzzled. After briefly interacting with the asteroid, the spacecraft left a 26-foot (8-meter) wide crater. In lab testing, the pickup procedure “barely made a divot.” 

After analyzing data from the spacecraft, they found it encountered the same amount of resistance a person on Earth would feel while squeezing the plunger on a French press coffee carafe. “By the time we fired our thrusters to leave the surface, we were still plunging into the asteroid,” said Ron Ballouz, a scientist with the OSIRIS-REx team.

According to NASA, its findings on Bennu could help scientists better interpret remote observations of other asteroids. In turn, that could help the agency design future asteroid missions. “I think we’re still at the beginning of understanding what these bodies are, because they behave in very counterintuitive ways,” said OSIRIS-REx team member Patrick Michel.

Ambrose Island, Hitman 3’s first new level since release, will arrive on July 26th. IO Interactive detailed the DLC on Friday when it published the game’s latest monthly roadmap. The studio promised to share more information about the new locale closer to release but on Friday IO said Ambrose Island would introduce new challenges for players to complete. Fans can also look forward to new rewards to unlock and targets to assassinate.

As The Verge points out, IO first previewed Ambrose Island at the start of the year as part of Hitman 3’s year two reveal. At the time, all the company had to share was a single screenshot of the tropical locale. With Friday’s announcement, IO said the DLC would take players to a pirate stronghold located in the Andaman Sea, and reunite protagonist Agent 47 with an “old friend.” Check out the trailer for the DLC below.

Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale may not begin until next week, but you can already find a handful of deals on electronics like the 10.2-inch iPad. This weekend, the retailer has discounted both the 64GB and 256GB variants of Apple’s entry-level tablet. You can now buy the base model 10.2-inch iPad – in both silver and space gray – for $299. A $30 discount off may not seem like much, but it effectively returns the iPad to its lowest price. As for the 256GB model, it’s currently $429, or $50 off its usual $479 price.

Engadget deputy editor Nathan Ingraham awarded Apple’s ninth-generation iPad a score of 86 in 2021. The 10.2-inch iPad is a solid entry-level tablet. With the company’s A13 Bionic chip inside, the 2021 model is fast, and you can expect to get about 10 to 14 hours from the battery. The new model also features a much-improved 12-megapixel front-facing camera with Apple’s Center Stage technology. The feature helps keep you in the middle of the frame during video calls.

Aside from looking stale, there are some practical downsides to the iPad’s dated design. If you want to use an Apple Pencil with the tablet, your only option is the first-generation model. Unfortunately, that means you must connect the stylus to your iPad’s Lightning Part anytime you need to charge it. The 10.2-inch model also doesn’t have the best screen. If you can get past those flaws, the ninth-generation iPad is a solid entry point into Apple’s ecosystem.

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Ahead of its annual Prime Day sale next week, Amazon has discounted the Apple Watch Series 7. As long as you don’t mind buying the wearable in green, you can get the 41mm model with GPS connectivity for $284. The $115 price drop represents a nearly 30 percent discount from the usual price of Apple’s latest smartwatch. And if green is not your color, some of the other models are available for $329 or less.

Engadget gave the Series 7 a score of 90 last fall. Apple may have not dramatically redesigned the wearable, but the changes it did introduce were impactful. Deputy editor Cherlynn Low found the move to a roomier screen made the Series 7 easier and more enjoyable to use thanks to there being more space the UI. She also appreciated the fact the Series 7 could charge faster than its predecessor.

If you’re on the fence because the Series 8 is right around the corner, most recent reports suggest you won't miss out on much. The one big feature that’s reportedly on the way is a body temperature sensor that will warn you when you’re running a fever. Otherwise, the Series 8 is expected to feature the same design and performance capabilities as its predecessor. For that reason, you’re probably better off picking up a discounted Series 7 now rather than waiting to buy the new model at full price.

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Blizzard is ending development on Heroes of the Storm. In a brief blog post published on Friday, the studio said it plans to support the MOBA “in a manner similar” to games like Starcraft II. Moving forward, Blizzard said fans can expect the company to continue to release patches that address bugs and balance issues “as needed.” However, it has “no plans” to add new content to the in-game shop – which, for the time being, will continue to operate.

“To our Heroes community, we say, ‘thank you,’” Blizzard said, noting it will gift a free in-game mount to players with the game’s next patch. “You continue to be one of our most passionate communities, we’re grateful for your continued dedication and support, and as always, we look forward to seeing you in the Nexus.”

Friday’s announcement effectively caps off what’s been a slow death for the Blizzard-universe MOBA. In 2018, former studio president J. Allen Brack said the studio had made the “difficult” decision to move some of the staff that had been working on Heroes of the Storm to other projects. Since then, the cadence of new content slowed to a trickle. The game’s most recently added hero came in 2020. Blizzard’s abrupt decision to end its support of the Heroes of the Storm esports scene also left many pros bitter with the company.

Samsung’s next Galaxy S series phone could mark the end of an era. According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the company is likely to single-source the processor for its next S series flagship from Qualcomm. That would be a significant departure for Samsung. Over the years, the company has used both Snapdragon and Exynos SoCs in its flagship phones.

The model you got would depend on where you lived. In the US, Galaxy S and Note series phones have exclusively come with Qualcomm chips, much to the envy of Samsung customers in Europe and Asia. In the past, in nearly every situation where Samsung has offered both Snapdragon and Exynos variants of its phones, the former have either outperformed the company’s in-house chips or provided better battery life. Qualcomm processors tend to also offer a more stable experience when it comes to apps and games.

Kuo suggests that reality has become too hard for Samsung to ignore. “S23 may not adopt Exynos 2300 made by Samsung 4nm because it can’t compete with SM8550 in all aspects,” he wrote on Twitter, referring to the next flagship chips from both Samsung and Qualcomm. Kuo adds such a decision would further cement Qualcomm’s dominance in the Android market.

What all of that could mean for the future of Samsung’s Exynos brand is hard to say. The company spent years working with AMD to design and create the Galaxy S22’s Exynos 2200, only for that chip to run into many of the same issues that affected its predecessors. In April, Samsung Mobile president TM Roh reportedly told employees the company was working on a chipset that would be “unique” to Samsung smartphones but didn’t elaborate on how that component would be different from the company’s existing Exynos designs.

On Saturday, Rogers Communications said it had restored service for the “vast majority” of customers affected by the outage that left many Canadians without access to the internet. “As our services come back online and traffic volumes return to normal, some customers may experience a delay in regaining full service," the telecom said in a Twitter update posted late Thursday evening. It later promised it was “working hard” to get any customers still without internet access back online “as quickly as possible.”

In a letter attributed to president and CEO Tony Staffieri, Rogers said it was “working to fully understand the root cause of this outage,” and that it would make all “the changes necessary” to avoid a repeat in the future. Additionally, the company promised to send a bill credit to every customer affected by the outage.

While Rogers has yet to share what caused its entire network to go down for the better part of an entire day, DDoS mitigation company Cloudflare provided a possible answer. “Based on what we’re seeing and similar incidents in the past, we believe this is likely to be an internal error, not a cyber attack,” the company said in a blog post published on Friday. Cloudflare speculated that a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) issue likely contributed to the outage. A “routine BGP update gone wrong” was the cause of the massive outage that took down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp last fall.

Whatever led to the outage, its effect was easy to see. People crowded into cafes and public libraries so that they could use their phones and computers. At one point, Toronto Police even noted some people couldn’t call 911 due to the outage. Across the country, Interac, the system Canadian banks use to connect their networks, was down, leading to debit cards and ATMs not working. One analysis by internet monitoring organization NetBlocks showed that Canada’s national connectivity dropped to 75 percent of normal levels during the event. If nothing else, the episode is likely to reignite conversation within Canada about the dominance Rogers has over the national telecom market.   

Moreso than most automakers, Rivian has had a tough 2022. At the start of the year, the company, blaming inflation and component shortages, raised the base price of its quad-motor R1T pickup truck by a whopping $12,000. And while it went on to quickly backtrack, the decision led to a shareholder lawsuit. 

Despite those early woes, Rivian says it’s still on track to produce 25,000 vehicles in 2022. The company reiterated the prediction in a statement it shared on Wednesday. Rivian said it built 4,401 R1T trucks, R1S SUVs and Amazon delivery vans at its factory in Normal, Illinois and delivered 4,467 vehicles during fiscal Q2.

“Supply chain and production are ramping,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe tweeted after the announcement. “We just announced production of 4,401 vehicles for Q2 bringing our cumulative total since start of production to 7,969 — keeping us on track to reach our year-end goals.”

While 4,401 vehicles is a modest tally, it is an improvement for Rivian. In the first three months of the year, the startup built 2,553 cars. Just as noteworthy is that the company managed to scale production while facing many of the same issues that have slowed its competition. On Saturday, Tesla announced its first quarter-over-quarter production decline in two years. In Q2, the company saw a 15 percent drop in manufacturing volume due to ongoing parts shortages and multiple COVID-19 shutdowns at its critical Shanghai Gigafactory.

Increasing production capacity will be critical to Rivian’s survival. In addition to an approximately 71,000 vehicle preorder backlog, the company has a 100,000 van order it needs to fulfill for minority owner Amazon. Late last year, Rivian announced it would build a second factory in Georgia, but that facility won’t be operational until sometime 2024. Until then, the startup is dependent on its single factory in Normal, which it says will eventually produce 200,000 vehicles annually.

Horizon Forbidden West was already one of the best-looking games on PlayStation 5, and now developer Guerrilla Games has found a way to make it look even better. With Forbidden West’s latest update, the studio has added a 40Hz “Balanced” rendering mode and support for both variable refresh rate (VRR) and high refresh rate (HFR).

VRR is a feature that’s relatively new to console gaming. It syncs your TV’s refresh rate to the frame rate of the game you’re playing, thereby helping to eliminate screen tearing whenever there’s a drop in performance. Meanwhile, the new Balanced setting promises to give you the best of Forbidden West’s existing Performance and Fidelity modes by offering a happy medium between the two.

If you’re curious about how you get “balanced” graphics from rendering a game at 40Hz, here’s how the math works. At 30Hz, it takes 33.33 milliseconds for your console to display a new frame. By contrast, at 40Hz and 60Hz, it renders a new frame every 25 and 16.66 milliseconds, respectively. So while it might seem counterintuitive, 40 fps is precisely halfway between 30 fps and 60 fps in terms of update speed. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart also offers a 40 fps mode, and when Insomniac first introduced the feature, Digital Foundry called it “a potential game-changer” for console gaming.

Outside of those improvements, patch 1.17 includes the usual assortment of bug fixes, with some designed to address glitches that could stop you from finishing the game. You can read the entire changelog on Reddit.

Apple’s long-rumored extreme sports Series 8 Watch could ship with the company’s largest smartwatch display to date. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the forthcoming wearable features a screen that measures almost 2 inches diagonally and has a 410 by 502 resolution. Compared to the display on the 45mm Series 7, the largest smartwatch Apple sells at the moment, the new model would offer about seven percent more screen real estate. Gurman says the company could use the extra space to show additional fitness metrics or more information on watch faces at one time.

Corroborating Bloomberg’s reporting is a recent tweet from display analyst Ross Young who said the Series 8 lineup would include a model with a 1.99-inch display. Outside of a larger screen, Gurman says the new variant will feature a more shatter-resistant screen, a higher capacity battery and a studier case made from metal more robust than aluminum. It will also include the fever detection feature he previously reported was coming to the entire Series 8 family, as well as better tracking capabilities for activities like hiking and swimming. What it won’t include is a faster processor: Apple’s upcoming S8 chipset reportedly features the same capabilities as its S7 and S6 predecessors.

If Apple follows its usual release cadence, the tech giant will likely announce the wearable at its iPhone event in the fall. Gurman previously said the company was working on a “deluge” of products it plans to announce over the next year, including a successor to the original HomePod.